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Ancient Near East Studies?

I am looking for some background information on the Ancient Near East during the time of Abraham (and earlier). I am also interested in ancient Egypt. Does anyone recommend a resource on this subject they have personally found helpful? Ideally I would like a popular - yet accurate - introduction to these ancient cultures.

Dale, I don't know what font you're using, but a fair amount of the vowels in your sig are not placed properly. For example, the hireq is between the kaf and the yod. It's below them, but not directly underneath either one, but between the two. A number of other vowels are also misplaced.

Dale, I don't know what font you're using, but a fair amount of the vowels in your sig are not placed properly. For example, the hireq is between the kaf and the yod. It's below them, but not directly underneath either one, but between the two. A number of other vowels are also misplaced.

I'd be curious to know what may be causing this.

Hmm, must be a combination of things. While his font is rather inelegant looking compared to yours, the vowels do line up right in my viewing. (Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows 7)

I'm using IE 8 on XP. I think lava lamps will be back en vogue before the unicode issue ever gets solved.

Unicode *is* better, but it has yet to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The first problem is that the Unicode map still is a moving target. I think most characters are pretty fixed but diacritics and other random obscure languages still seem to be in flux. The second is that even if all the positions were fixed, Unicode fonts still don't support every single character. So yeah, better, but definitely not perfect.

Font for Hebrew

Originally Posted by Adelphos

Dale, I don't know what font you're using, but a fair amount of the vowels in your sig are not placed properly.

I think it was Arial, and it looked fine on my screen, which like Hanel's is Firefox but in Windows Vista. I changed the font to Georgia. Does that improve the vowel placement on your screen, or does it show the same problem?

And as for how it's generated, I think I probably cut from BW, pasted it into Nota Bene, then cut and pasted it into the forum signature.

I changed the font to Georgia. Does that improve the vowel placement on your screen, or does it show the same problem?

It does look better -- a lot better compared to the former -- but there are still misplacements with some of the vowels.

For example, the hireq is still not directly under the kaf in the first word, but the kaf and the yod are now close together so that there is no space between the two consonants as in the previous font, but the hireq is still between them, although that doesn't appear anywhere near as significant as it did with the previous font.

Now that is odd

I just opened this page in Firefox, IE and Chrome.
The differences were amazing. In all of them, in Dale's signature, a vowel comes after and not under a doubled consonant. Scott's signature appears like a completely different face in each browser. Does that make sense to anyone?